Thomas Woodruff: Resurrection

New York painter Thomas Woodruff is best known since the mid-1980s for his precisionist technique and arcane, phantasmagoric imagery, often dealing in metaphorical ways with topical issues—social strife, the AIDS crisis, sexual identity, and the struggles of the LGBTQ+ community. For the recent works in this luminous show, Resurrection, he looks to the far distant past for inspiration, conjuring an apocalyptic yet buoyant vision of the end of the Mesozoic Era (around 100 million years ago or so) that uncannily parallels our own. Relayed in the three large canvases on view (ranging up to six feet high, and nine feet wide), plus twelve smaller oval-shaped canvases, Woodruff’s primordial saga features meticulously painted dinosaurs—a Tyrannosaurus rex and pterodactyls—as well as a Mesozoic millepede, and dinosaur eggs about to hatch. 

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